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A former display of fourteen giant billiard balls mounted on top of the Billiard Shop at 4/161 James Street, Toowoomba.
Private to your Passport.
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Not a stop to travel to
This Big Thing is recorded for its history. It is no longer at this location, so it is not a stop to plan a trip around.
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The Big Billiard Balls
This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 27.5688° S, 151.9555° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Fourteen billiard balls sat on the roof of a billiard shop on James Street. There is no cleverness to unpack: the shop sold billiard tables, so the roof had billiard balls on it, in the full set of colours and numbers, and anybody driving past understood the business instantly.
That is the commercial Big Thing in its purest form. Not a monument, not a tourist draw, not a civic project – a shopfront sign that happened to be enormous, put up by a business that needed to be found. Toowoomba is a large regional city on the Darling Downs with a long main-road retail strip, and a roofline full of coloured spheres solved the problem of standing out on it.
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PRACTICAL
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WHAT TO EXPECT
The Big Billiard Balls were a set of fourteen oversized billiard balls mounted on top of the Billiard Shop at 4/161 James Street, Toowoomba – a classic example of a commercial Big Thing built to advertise the business beneath it.
ACCESS
Historical listing only. The former site is the commercial complex at 161 James Street, but visitors should not navigate there expecting to see the balls: the attraction has been removed and the premises have changed use/ownership.
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TRANSPARENCY
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